# Alex Powell

> Software designer and engineering leader.  Sci-Tech award recipient for Premo, realtime feature animation tooling.  Emphasizing creativity, innovation, and artistry.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/alexpowell

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer @ Meta
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | United States
3D avatar excellence.

### 3D Design Manager @ Snap Inc.
Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area
Creative agency sourcing and management, 3D design systems, AR/Spectacles, avatars/character systems

### Head of Mobile and Product Engineering, Flipagram @ ByteDance
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Los Angeles, CA
Head of iOS, Android and QA teams and product engineering.
• Flipagram consistently ranked in top 10 Photo and Video apps on iOS and Android
• Full-screen design for mobile video creation and consumption
• Developed state-of-the-art Android and iOS video rendering engines with 3D face augmented reality, music-driven effects and drawing, frame-accurate speed control with pitch preservation, reverse, and more.
• Established robust engineering practices for industry-leading crash-free rates
• Acquired in Jan 2017 by Bytedance

### Software Engineer, Google Photos @ Google
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Los Angeles, CA
Google Photos first mobile app.  Mobile photo and video effects, especially realtime mobile ML face tracking & warping.  Cloud photo processing.  Creator of automatic face painting campaigns promoted on Google's home page, such as Halloweenify and World Cup Face Painting.

### Principal Engineer @ DreamWorks Animation
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014
Lead designer and architect of Premo, the SciTech award winning proprietary animation software for DreamWorks Animation.  Led team of 50 animation and rigging engineers and established vision across the program. Software architecture, design, and executive management to meet production targets.  Successfully deployed new animation tool to 8 feature film productions, and shaped the direction of the animation & rigging programs for years to come.

### Technical Lead - Animation Program @ DreamWorks Animation
Jan 2010 – Jan 2013
Architect and lead of a multi-site, multi-continental team to develop a brand new, world-class interactive 3D animation tool.  Grew team 4x, to 50 motivated, successful engineers, and established software practices necessary to build a new large-scale application from the ground up.  Modernized character deformation and motion control techniques for scalable multicore processing.

Expertise in Qt, C++, user interface design, character rigging and deformation, geometry.

### Technical Lead - Character Setup Tools @ DreamWorks Animation
Jan 2006 – Jan 2010
Led the development and maintenance of a proprietary integrated character rigging environment, which has now been used by more than 30 feature films and is still in use today.  As a geometry specialist, developed 3D modeling and deformation tools.

### Student Researcher @ GVU Center
Jan 2002 – Jan 2005


## Education
### Master's degree in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alexpowell

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Source: https://flows.cv/alexpowell
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alexpowell/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-13